Another European agency shifts off US Tech as digital sovereignty gains steam

Because it's pretty refined since it was funded with resources so great that it was intended to serve global level audience?

I don't believe that EU will have comparable quality "tech" without restricting US market access in EU. Unfortunately, refined high quality software requires considerable resources and no one will invest those considerable resources when the US companies can just offer better software at lower price thanks to their lead and deep pockets until the EU companies go out of business. Sure, EU doesn't need to discover everything again but they will need to pay top talent world class money for years until their products become refined.

The more they invest, the more corporations will be able to switch.

Not every company needs, wants or has room to become google scale. Stability long term is something we hold dearly in Europe, not everybody runs in 10 seconds attention span.

People who actually work with that to achieve things that may be just as important care a lot.

We have fools in many places, but not that much and that bad. Look at defense - every single country in Europe is ramping defense budget big time, most of those money goes to European companies. Doesn't matter much how good US tech currently is, if it has electronics that can be tweaked or switched off remotely its a massive risk. F16 case was really enough for whole world to wake up and reevaluate.

Why should any other industry including what we discuss react differently? Private companies can risk as much as they want, its up to governments to sweeten the deal for local stuff or let it be, sure there market forces can play as hard as wanted.

> Sure, EU doesn't need to discover everything again but they will need to pay top talent world class money for years until their products become refined.

Just like the US didn't need to rediscover the inventions of cars, submarines, the web, the printed press and more to be able to build better iterations on those, wouldn't the exact same apply the other way?

It feels like whatever you're saying today could be said the other way in the past, so why does it really matter?

The fact on the ground is that people don't trust the US overall as much, even less the leadership of the US, so whatever dependency has been built up over the years, has to be fixed, no matter if the "local" technology is shittier at the moment.

I'm sure Americans felt the same about printing presses back in the day, where some things you just have to be able to do without needing the permission of others far away.

That's why Google, Samsung and others were able to create smartphones comparable to iPhone without having a Steve Jobs and a Johny Ive right after Apple made one.

Once you know the way forward, the rest is an engineering task and it's matter of working towards it. Very low risk compared to the initial work done by the pioneers.

Lots of real time material evidence exists.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/z62gjfr

It's not matter of talent, its matter of investing a few tens billions into it and its not going to happen if US companies can just undercut and wait it out.

You get the point. When you are getting into an established industry see what works, skip investing billions in directions that go nowhere.

But isn't it a matter of talent? While Americans obsess over tech and high paying jobs, Europeans seem to emphasize other subjects, not to mention have a lot more vacation days. What is to be made of that?

I don't know if you are familiar with coding or engineering but it's nor really a kind of a profession where you work all the time and the more hours you put in it the output increases linearly.

It's not like Europeans couldn't code Facebook because they were taking too many vacations, unlike Russians and Chinese that did. It's that Chinese and Russian markets had restriction and local clones or alternatives were able to flourish but EU had completely open market for US "tech".

Cut off Meta, double the vacations in EU and in a year there will be European social media. As it was demonstrated by Elon Musk, you don't need that many people to work in those "tech" companies anyway.

Running a software business in Europe is not against the laws of physics or anything, but it is also worth considering why Europe doesn’t already have a thriving software sector. The US shooting itself in the foot might help a little, but there are still lots of internal barriers, like those outlined in the Draghi report.

Why is that your impression of the software sector in Europe? Just because there isn't a "Eat the whole world Google/Amazon/Microsoft" company that ends up in American business-news, doesn't mean the it isn't one of the most well-paid and comfortable sectors in the continent, just like everywhere else, compared to other sectors.

I think as a whole it seems like Europe in general and particularly the EU has a lot more focuses than just "Tech Innovation", although it's still one part needing improvement. Even the report you referenced mentions the energy sector as a top priority, and slow steps are taken to upgrade infrastructure at all sorts of levels and sectors.

Software is but one part of life, but of course many of us here get lost in focusing a lot on software itself, I'm guilty of it myself too.

But in the context of "digital sovereignty," it seems to me that so many giant pillars of tech (desktop OSes, mobile OSes, cloud platforms, enterprise crap like Salesforce, and so on) are managed by American firms. So if Europe wanted to take all of those things in house, that would require a significant expansion of the European software sector. And that wouldn't be super straightforward due to the many obstacles to things like venture capital funding outlined in the Draghi report.

Now I'm more than a little skeptical of the whole "digital sovereignty" concept. There's a reason every country doesn't it make it's own airplanes, cars, wine, espresso machines, and medical devices; those reasons apply more or less equally to software development. The cost of “sovereignty” is very, very high. But, if we do buy into the idea that countries need to diversify away from American software, I think that necessarily entails a large increase in the software sector of places like Europe.

Russian IT thrived when there were no restrictions or artificial barriers. It's just different culture and different energy that EU doesn't have.

Some of this top talent is already in the EU working for US companies